Jeffrey Park has been a faculty member in the Department of Geology and Geophysics at Yale University since 1986. Born in Los Angeles and raised in Orange County, California, Jeffrey was introduced to seismology when tossed from his bed by the 1971 Sylmar earthquake. Upon arrival at Princeton as an undergraduate in 1975, Jeffrey asked Prof Ken Deffeyes at a Freshman Week reception whether he could study plate tectonics at Princeton. The precise words of Deffeyes' response were not recorded, but Jeffrey remembers something like "O Callow One! Plate tectonics was invented here! Take thy quest to third-floor I-Wing." So it went. Jeffrey majored in Physics but did his senior thesis in geophysics under the direction of Prof. Tony Dahlen, looking for evidence that the great 1977 Sunda earthquake had measurably excited Earth's Chandler Wobble.

Jeffrey earned his PhD at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in 1985, developing computer algorithms for the coupling of seismic free oscillation and for multiple-taper spectrum analysis. Jeffrey returned to Princeton as a postdoc for 1.5 years, working on free-oscillation coupling problems, and getting introduced to paleoclimate time series by Prof Al Fischer and grad student Timothy Herbert. As a faculty member at Yale, Jeffrey continued research in free oscillations, seismic wave scattering by elastic anisotropy, time series of paleoclimate and historical temperature data, and the mantle tectonics of Kamchatka and Italy. He has co-revised the textbook Dynamic Earth with Brian Skinner and Stephen Porter in 2002-3, and was elected a Fellow of the American Geophysical Union in 2006.